United States 1970 - 1975 by Jacob Holdt
Steidl, 272 pages
UK £22.00, US $40.00, EC €32.00
In the early 1970s, when Jacob Holdt first arrived in the US with 40 dollars in his pocket, he planned to travel quickly across the country to South America. But, totally shocked and fascinated by what he discovered, he ended up staying five years documenting the poverty he saw. Holdt hitch-hiked over 100,000 miles, selling his blood twice a week to make some money and taking lifts and offers to stay from whomever came his way. Holdt visited more than 350 homes where he photographed the people he lived with: poor blacks from the ghettos, millionaires, junkies, members of the Ku Klux Klan. The result is an incredible portrait of America and its underclass.
Francis Alÿs
Phaidon, 160 pages
£24.95
The Belgian-born, Mexico City-based artist gets the Phaidon monograph treatment in this perfect paperback introduction to his work. Francis Alÿs employs a range of media - including painting, video, and other more unorthodox materials - in his exploration of urban space, the boundaries between artist and subject, and the invention of myths and fables. Also included in the book is an interview by Russell Ferguson, Chair of the Department of Art, University of California, Los Angeles, and the curator of the first large-scale exhibition of Alys's work, which opens in September 2007 at the Hammer, where Ferguson is also Adjunct Curator.
Janne Lehtinen: The Descendants
Hatje Cantz, 80 pages
€ 39.80
In his last book, awarded the German Photography Book Prize, Finnish photographer Janne Lehtinen (b.1970) documented his attempts to fly in his own strange handmade structures. In this new book, Lehtinen returns to Lehtiskylä, the town in the south of Finland where he grew up and which historically has been burdened with a sense of doomed fate. The images and the accompanying memories - his sick uncle's little bottles of pills, the corpse in the river, the last meal eaten by Veikko the old horse, a schoolmate's accident - do not promise better things to come, yet there is a certain beauty to the "curse" of Lehtiskylä as captured by Lehtinen.
Robert Gober, Sculptures 1979 - 2007
Steidl, 544 pages
UK £45.00, US $85.00, EC €65.00
This book serves as the catalogue for an outstanding exhibition at the Schaulager in Basel, the most comprehensive survey of Robert Gober's sculptures and installations made between 1979, when Gober first began exhibiting his work publicly, and 2007. Over 250 works are featured in the book, which also contains Gober's own commentary on individual works and technical information about how they were produced and the history behind them.
Panic Attack! Art in the Punk Years
Edited by Mark Sladen and Ariella Yedgar
Merrell, 224pp
UK £29.95, US $44.95
Punk is most commonly associated with music, fashion and graphics, but its rebellious and iconoclastic spirit also found expression in the visual arts. Panic Attack! explores British and American art between 1974 and 1984, a period of not only economic and social crisis but also remarkable cultural energy, when art became increasingly politicized just as society at large was moving towards conservatism. Many of the artists featured, such as Gilbert & George, Nan Goldin, Derek Jarman and Robert Mapplethorpe, were part of a dynamic interdisciplinary scene that embraced both art and music, producing work that was sometimes confrontational or angry, but always fiercely independent and intelligent.
Passing Through Eden: Photographs of Central Park by Tod Papageorge
Steidl, 176 pages
UK £32.00, US $60.00, EC €40.00
Tod Papageorge began to photograph extensively in New York's Central Park in the late 1970s, a few years after he turned from the Leica to medium-format cameras. These pictures trace, as Rosalind Krauss has written about Papageorge's work, 'photography's capacity to embrace the sensuous richness of physical reality... [in order to] come to...that fullness which Baudelaire used to call intimacy, when he meant eroticism.' Papageorge constructs a realm that resembles our common world, but that, in its intense marrying of the sensual and poetic, calls up the Eden invoked in the book's title. As the press material puts it, Papageorge's photographs 'energetically confirm that the human comedy is alive and well in Central Park'. Since 1979 Tod Papageorge has been the Walker Evans Professor of Photography at the Yale University School of Art.
Land Art: The Earth as Canvas
Taschen, 96 pages
$9.99, £GBP 5.99, EUR 6.99
A perfect paperback to inspire your summer travels following in the footsteps of artists such as Robert Smithson, James Turrell, Richard Long and Walter de Maria, who have chosen to make works of art in sites outside the confines of galleries and museums. In the deserts of America, or the moors of Scotland spectacular earthen sculptures of gigantic proportions remain for art pilgrims to visit, altering our perception of places, the landscape and our relationship to it.
Yael Bartana
Hatje Cantz, 104 pages
€ 24.80
The work of Israeli video artist Yael Bartana (born 1970) is acutely attuned to the political situation in her homeland. This publication contains an extensive visual and written presentation of all of the artist's works, including 'Trembling Time' (2001), which captures the annual minute of silence in the country for those who fell in Israel's wars.
Cerith Wyn Evans: Bubble Peddler
Edited by Peter Pakesch. Text by Mark Cousins, Martin Prinzhorn, Jan Verwoert, Adam Budak.
Walther Koenig/DAP, 100 pages
US $43.00
This collection of key works by the London conceptualist Cerith Wyn Evans features chandeliers and fireworks that speak, plants that are able to generate light and installations that dramatize our experience. Magical and uncanny, excessive and yet minimal, the works radically alter our perceptions and challenge our visions.
Fischli Weiss: Flowers & Questions: A Retrospective
by Bice Curiger
Abrams
$35.00
Since 1979, Peter Fischli and David Weiss have been cheerfully celebrating the banality of everyday existence and, in the process, rising to the forefront of the contemporary international art world. Their work deliberately ignores the traditional distinction between high and low art, and employs a wide variety of media, including photography, film, video, artists' books, installation, and sculpture. 'Flowers & Questions' is the most thorough survey to date of one of the most fascinating and varied careers in contemporary art. The book includes contributions from a wide range of writers, critics, artists, and filmmakers, including leading art critic Arthur C. Danto, cult filmmaker John Waters, curator and writer Hans Ulrich Obrist, and artist Tacita Dean.
Eden's Edge: Fifteen L.A. Artists
Text by Gary Garrels
DAP, 144 pages
$35.00
Published to accompany the Hammer Museum's exhibition, 'Eden's Edge' (until 2 September), this exploration of art made in Los Angeles during the past decade crosses generations, mediums, and materials to link 15 artists, some internationally established, others not-yet-discovered. The book, which features Ginny Bishton, Mark Bradford, Liz Craft, Sharon Ellis, Matt Greene, Elliott Hundley, Stanya Kahn and Harry Dodge, Monica Majoli, Rebecca Morales, Matthew Monahan, Lari Pittman, Ken Price, Jason Rhodes, Anna Sew Hoy and Jim Shaw, provides an invaluable look at the artistic scene in LA and at the trends in art made by artists based in southern California over the last ten years.
Burning Man: Art in the Desert by A. Leo Nash, Daniel Pinchbeck
Abrams
US $29.95
For one week in August the Burning Man Festival in Nevada's Black Rock Desert brings people together in a spirit of self-reliance and creativity. Art has become the defining feature of Burning Man, as the festival continues to be a testing ground for a growing circle of artists seeking engaged audiences. Their most compelling works are large-scale constructions that are burned at the end of the festival, and radically altered vehicles, or "art cars." For more than a decade, A. Leo Nash has been photographing this work which is put into context by Daniel Pinchbeck, the author of Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism .
Action Half Life by AES+F
Nazraeli Press, 40 pages
$60.00
For their project 'Action Half Life' - the name of an actual computer game - the Russian-born collective AES+F, which is representing Russia at this year's Venice Biennale, recruited young teenagers from modelling agencies to act out the roles of conquering heroes and heroines in this conceptual battlefield. Set against the rugged backdrop of the Sinai Desert, there is no sign of an enemy, nor any of the usual mess or horror of war. These children look like children, but they do not appear as children. Equipped with a steely array of futuristic-looking armaments, they are airbrush-clean and kitted out in crisp white clothing. AES+F has created frozen-in-the-moment tableaux that radiate an unsettling but awe-inspiring combination of sheer beauty and mounting unease. AES+F comprises conceptual architects Tatiana Arzamasova and Lev Evzovitch, graphic designer Evgeny Svyatsky and fashion photographer Vladimir Fridkes.
Pierre Et Gilles: Double Je, 1976-2007
Taschen, 460 pages
$49.99, £29.99, EUR 39.99
Pierre et Gilles create dreamy portraits that transport their subjects - as well as the viewers - into an alternate world where camp, pop, burlesque, religion, and eroticism mingle in perfect harmony. This book accompanies a retrospective of their work on view at the Jeu de Paume in Paris until September 2007, with reproductions of the 130 works in the exhibition as well as a further 170 photographs created over the last 10 years. With Pierre as photographer and Gilles as painter/elaborator, the French duo have photographed hundreds of stars including Iggy Pop, Madonna, Marc Almond, Catherine Deneuve, and Marilyn Manson. The results of their thirty-year collaboration is also celebrated in the book in an essay by fellow artist Jeff Koons.
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